Accession Number
2004/2.80.19

Title
All the benches are wet, the woods are so rusty

Artist(s)
Patrick Caulfield

Artist Nationality
British (modern)

Object Creation Date
1973

Medium & Support
screenprint on paper

Dimensions
16 1/8 in x 14 3/16 in (41 cm x 36 cm);24 in x 22 1/16 in (61 cm x 56 cm)

Credit Line
Gift of Jack A. and Noreen Rounick

Subject matter
Nineteenth in a series of twenty-two, this print accompanies a book of poems by the French poet and art critic Jules Laforgue and screenprints by British Pop artist Patrick Caulfield. Admired by the artist, Laforgue was a nineteenth-century symbolist poet who was one of the inventors of vers libre or "free verse" poetry. This new form of poetic verse relied on the phrase as a unit rather than constraining the poetic verse to set numbers of syllables. Laforgue’s poetry became important for later poets like T.S. Eliot because of its blending of observations of everyday life with poetic associations. In this book, Caulfield used the long-dead poets verses as inspiration for twenty-two scenes, created in colorful screenprint. Of these prints, Caulfield noted that “They are not illustrations but complementary images. There are few visually descriptive lines in Laforgue. The images suggest the things I have imagined the poet seeing when he wrote the poem…”

Physical Description
This print shows a cluster of branches coming from the left side of the page, and they are outlined in thick black lines and colored in a deep orange. The background is a solid purple color.

Primary Object Classification
Print

Primary Object Type
color print

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please visit http://umma.umich.edu/request-image for more information and to fill out the online Image Rights and Reproductions Request Form.

Keywords
Pop (fine arts styles)
artists' books (books)
branches (plant components)
poetry
portfolios (groups of works)
rust
screen prints